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Banks, I., and Pollard, T. (2014) Beyond Recall: Searching for the Remains of a British Secret Weapon of World War I

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Banks, I., and Pollard, T. (2014) Beyond Recall: Searching for the Remains of a British Secret Weapon of World War I Banks, I., and Pollard, T. (2014) Beyond recall: searching for the remains of a British secret weapon of World War I. Journal of Conflict Archaeology, 9 (3). pp. 119-155. Copyright © 2014 W.S. Maney & Son Ltd A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge Content must not be changed in any way or reproduced in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holder(s) When referring to this work, full bibliographic details must be given http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/102033 Deposited on: 30 January 2015 Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk Beyond Recall: Searching for the Remains of a British Secret Weapon of World War I Iain Banks & Tony Pollard Centre for Battlefield Archaeology, University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK Abstract This article discusses the development of the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector, a massive British flamethrower that was used against German trenches in the Battle of the Somme in 1916. Built underground within saps below No Man’s Land, this secret weapon was an attempt to use technology to break through German defences and reduce British casualties. The flame projector was the most effective flamethrower developed in WWI, but proved to be too inflexible and expensive to be used. Keywords: Flame Projector, flamethrower, the Somme, Underground War, William Livens Introduction The First World War was as much a war of technology as it was a war between men, and throughout the war, attempts were made to break the stalemate of the trenches through the development of new techniques and weaponry (see for example Showalter, 2006; Müller, 2006). Some of the developments of the war are very well known: poison gas is a defining element of the Western Front (Haber, 1986), while aerial warfare came into its own for the first time. In the past few years, the work of Peter Barton and Jeremy Banning has started to focus attention on the Underground War (eg Barton, 2011), which was fought beneath the trenches, some of it just below the surface while other tunnel systems plunged over 30 m under the Western Front. The tunnels were dug for a range of reasons, some of which are discussed in other papers in this volume; the particular purpose of the tunnels that are the subject of this paper was the construction of an Allied secret weapon. In this case, it was the construction of a Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector, a truly horrific weapon designed to wipe out the German frontline. Flamethrowers in the First World War The Flame Projector was a British response to the German use of the flamethrower. The flamethrower was first patented by Richard Fiedler in Germany in 1901, and he was given funds by the German Oberste Heeresleitung (German Army High Command) to continue development of the machine; it was introduced to a special pioneer company in 1908 (Wictor, 2010). The machines were little used at the start of the war because of technical problems, but these were resolved during 1915. Flamethrowers were used with some success against the French initially, with British troops facing their first experience of flamethrower assault on July 30, 1915 at Hooge (ibid.). This was a resounding success for the Germans, with the inexperienced British troops abandoning their trenches in panic. Relatively few of the casualties were direct victims of the flames, the majority being shot as the flames flushed them out of the trenches. The result was not particularly long- lasting as the British re-took the trenches over the next couple of days, but the success of the attack convinced both the British and the French that flamethrowers had great potential for breaking the stalemate of the trenches. The German tactic for flamethrowers used them as part of a shock troop that went in ahead of the regular infantry; the flamethrower operators were supported by riflemen carrying grenades and pioneers with tools and charges for breaching wire entanglements and other defences. Germany found the flamethrower to be an effective weapon in trench warfare: Wictor notes 653 attacks by the German Pioneer flamethrower regiment with a success rate of around 82% (Wictor, op. cit.) At the same time, the Pioneer regiments took quite high casualties, which meant that there was a constant need for replacement troops. These casualties are perhaps unsurprising given the role of the flamethrower operators as shock troops in advance of the main assault. While supported by rifles and machine guns, they were naturally the first target of any returning fire from the Allied trenches. Both Britain and France developed portable flamethrowers, although the French were far more enthusiastic about their version than the British. British High Command considered the machines were too limited because of the speed at which the fuel was used up (c. 20 seconds), and the portable flamethrowers were used infrequently. Instead, Britain tried to develop larger versions. A first, relatively unsuccessful form was a medium-sized flamethrower that could last for 20 seconds but which had a longer range (50 m as opposed to the previous 30 m); however, it needed two people to operate it. A heavier version could cover 80 m and last for 50 seconds, but required a crew of eight men. Both versions were impractical in the trench warfare of the Western Front, and they were rarely used (Payne, 2008). While most developments by the combatants focused on portable machines like the German examples, the British also developed a very different approach. The Royal Engineers displayed a certain degree of lateral thinking; rather than using shock troops who had to face the dangers of No Man’s Land before being able to deploy their weapon, the R.E.’s Special Brigade Z Company conceived of a flamethrower that would attack by stealth, with the approach to the German trenches being made underground. The flamethrower to be used was on a completely diffferent scale to any existing machine; it was 17 m long and weighed 2.5 tons. It required 200 men to bring the parts together to be assembled, and it was not designed to be mobile. Instead, it was designed to be built in a side gallery of a sap running under No Man’s Land, emerging just short of the German trenches. This flamethrower was named the Livens Large Gallery Flame Projector, after its inventor William Livens. Capt William H. Livens, R. E. Captain William Howard Livens was a civil engineer who joined the Royal Engineers on the outbreak of war on 4 August 1914, initially being in the Signals Corps of the R.E. He returned to Chatham in early 1915 in charge of the signallers’ motorcyclists, but while in Chatham, he decided to work on poison gas as the British Army tried to respond to the German use of chlorine gas on 22 April 1915. He carried out a number of experiments on his own account while there, and it was suggested to him that he should apply to join Brigadier Charles Foulkes’ Special Brigade who were working on the use of gas. He transferred to the Special Brigade in August 1915, and was unusual amongst his peers as being an engineer rather than a chemist (Richter, 1992: 148-49). Livens was very driven in his work, with Foulkes describing him variously as a ‘go-getter’ and as someone ‘with little use for factors of safety or correct official procedure’ (Richter, 1992.: 150). Livens himself after the war explained his motivation as a desire to kill 1,100 Germans in revenge for the deaths on the RMS Lusitania1. In addition to the general outrage at the sinking of what was considered to be a civilian target, Livens believed that his fiancée Elizabeth Price had been on the Lusitania when it sank; according to his account given during an interview in the Daily Graphic, she had been intending to travel on the ship and had told him in a letter that she would be doing so (Anon., 1921). Livens said that he had received the letter the day before the sinking, and had assumed that she was lost. He had made enquiries and been told that someone of her name had been booked onto the ship. Three days later, he found out that she was alive and was coming home on a different ship, but by that stage he had decided to avenge the dead of the Lusitania. Whether this was genuinely how he felt at the time or it was a post-war justification will never be known. What is clear is that Livens set about the task with great energy and initiative. Following his work on the flame projector, Livens became best-known for his work on poison gas and specifically the delivery system. He invented the Livens Projector, which was a cheap form of trench mortar designed to be fired remotely by an electrical current. Livens knew that gas could be delivered far more effectively than it initially was. The two techniques used in 1914 and 1915 were cloud attacks and gas shells. Cloud attacks depended on the release of a large cloud of gas from tanks, which risked the gas drifting back onto the attackers since the release was just in front of their own lines, or even within the frontline trenches. Gas poured out of arrays of gas cylinders, and drifted across No Man’s Land towards the enemy. A shift in the wind could spell disaster, pushing the gas back into the attackers’ faces (which happened in the first British gas attack at Loos on 25 September 1915).
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